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Open Source: Jumping the Shark or Poised for Dominance?

Open source is at a critical juncture. The challenge? Fitting all the pieces together in complex stacks without using the right glue.

By any measure, the rise of open source software as an alternative to the old proprietary ways has been remarkable. Today, there are tens of millions of libraries hosted at GitHub alone, and the number of major projects is growing rapidly. As of this writing the Apache Software Foundation hosts over 300 projects, while the Linux Foundation supports over 60. Meanwhile, the more narrowly-focused OpenStack Foundation boasts 60,000 members living in more than 180 countries.

So what could possibly be wrong with this picture?

What’s missing is enough awareness that while open source software can meet the great majority of user demands, it can’t, standing alone, meet all of them. Worse yet, too many members of the open source community (business leads as well as developers) have no interest in making use of the most appropriate tools available to close the gap.